User talk:Tony Wills/Archive003

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Archive

Archives


4/Mar/07 - 29/Aug/07
29/Aug/07 - 6/Dec/07

Adminship

Hi Tony. Would you accept if I nominated you for admin? Although I do not always agree with your points of view, I admire the way you get involved in discussions about all type of issues. You are an asset to the Commons community. Lycaon 09:26, 6 December 2007 (UTC)

Dear Mr. or Mrs. Lycaon, forgive me for 'talk'ing to you here but you don't answer my messages on your talk page. Your recent starfish svg is very beautiful but every time I try to load it in my browser (and I try mostly because of its beauty) without the html page supporting it, my browser breaks; it breaks quickly and cleanly and even the cpu graph thingie doesn't respond to its sudden absence. I am sorry about all of that. -- carol 10:15, 6 December 2007 (UTC)
Dear Ms Carol, I believe Hans is a Mr :-). I was looking to review it earlier and it also crashed my Firefox when I tried to enlarge it to full size, but I put that down to having 24 firefox windows open (across two screens) (with numerous tabs on each one). Up to that point the main problem I had was simply following where the different labels pointed to exactly, perhaps heavier lines or a different colour? --Tony Wills 11:00, 6 December 2007 (UTC)
For me, it broke when I had tabs between 5 and 10 and also when I had only one window. I was actually considering using it to shut the browser down quickly when I need to. Also, I am still of the opinion that the image was very beautiful and have yet to see it for long enough to have any ideas other than that one.
So far, what I have seen that makes the difference between an admin and a motivated user (and I saw this on another wiki) is that an admin can supercede all talk and just delete things because their is a whim or a feeling of recognition of the subject matter or whatever makes one feel enabled to supercede discussion. I wonder if it is worth it. Like, is the pay any better? -- carol 14:02, 6 December 2007 (UTC)
I believe the pay is twice what I get at the moment ;-) --Tony Wills 22:02, 6 December 2007 (UTC)

Tony - I would have seconded Lycaon's invitation had you not declined it first. --MichaelMaggs 20:18, 6 December 2007 (UTC)

Sonchus oleraceus

Hi, I see your question mark now LOL I did it from your naming, I guess a separate gallery should be put in place for it then? WayneRay 14:24, 6 December 2007 (UTC)WayneRay

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A few points of clarification :-)

Reply in my talk page - Alvesgaspar 12:19, 8 December 2007 (UTC)

  • I really don't think you have to spend $3 or $4K to have a decent DSLR macro camera. I got my Nikon D80 (800 euros), with an expensive Nikon 18-200 zoom (700 euros) and a second hand Tokina macro (200 euros) for less than that. But there are cheaper, and equally good, DSLR cameras, like the Nikon D40 or the Canon EOS 400D. Alvesgaspar 11:17, 11 December 2007 (UTC)

downsampling to improve images

I like to rely on people who seem to know what they are talking about to fill in all of the very large gaps in my knowledge. I probably have on occasion relied on the wrong person just because of the strength of the voice or the number of people who agreed with the information that was being delivered. Also, the filters -- I had to endure some situations here and there (I make it sound worse than it was -- constant quoting of old tired television shows was one of my personal endurance records) and be paying just enough attention to grab the good information out and remember it.

I mention this all right now because there are some diagrams that are going to be accepted as FP that reportedly are not correct. I wonder if that is because downsampling has been used wrongly and gangs of whatever have opted for the bliss of ignorance rather than the freedom of saying 'oops'?

In my more than a couple but less than a few decades of being alive; I have found that ignorance is not as blissful as the old adage suggests.

So, in summary, for me it has been 'remember what you are doing it and the reason you were doing it'. But my question is 'what are they doing and are they doing it for "this" (in this case, downsampling) reason?' -- carol 11:42, 9 December 2007 (UTC)

also!

Please don't stop taking photographs of weeds or consider them to be secondary to photographs of more cultured flowers or sensitive flowers.

There are people who were rudely uprooted from where those weeds were aplenty and stuck into an environment which is comparatively a desert who really appreciate thosed weeds before and really really really miss them now.

Your clover flower made me think of something funny that the food co-ops were doing at home. The things that you could possibly pick right out side their doorway which were dried and put into the jars to be sold in bulk for tea were really really expensive. It took me a while to figure out how perfect that was.

There was another situation at those co-ops back in the 1980's (which your flower also made me think of) in which the one town had two co-ops. One of them sold dried seaweed and the label said that it was harvested by some guy who lived in this awesome house and that he had done all of this stuff to keep the salt water around it unpolluted and such. The other one sold a jar that said it was just seaweed. The prices were different by a factor of 4, the greater being the awesome house and the promises and the lesser being just seaweed. I laughed and bought the just seaweed because I never thought I would be living in an awesome house at the expense of others and due to the quality of my promises and definitely not because of purity. Also, I think that you should enjoy the environment that your lifestyle and the lifestyle of those you share the planet with creates.

I also read somewhere that you cannot turn water into ice unless the water is somewhat impure. No, I didn't read that -- my dad told me that and I believed him on that one. -- carol 12:21, 9 December 2007 (UTC)

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OK. If "commons" has a policy haw to deal with category I am not going to go across this... A "see also" link is a resonable way out in a such situation. I have only mixed feelings about "Jedi category". They are obviously Star Wars characters. On other hands there are very various types of them... Regards Elektron 12:40, 17 December 2007 (UTC)

Invasive Species and Hoverflies and Airports

I was looking for information about Hiercium (probably because of Alves photographs) when I found http://www.landcareresearch.co.nz/research/biocons/weeds/hieracium/index.asp

The english wikipedia page on Hoverflies features some of Alves photographs and a nice paragraph about how different varieties of flowers are planted to attract these insects as they eat other insects.

The photograph they have is of an airport field which if the hiercium is not taking that over than probably something else (native or not) will. Then I further question the integrity of the page because my one of my first online friends was very strongly of the opinion that it should really be one of the indigenous peoples of New Zealand who should be claiming to be so, an idea that I can easily agree with. These things keep running through my mind, along with the memory of the swamps that really were being destroyed by the loosestrife back in time and where I should be now (or at least much closer to there).

I had also the experience that a few web pages appeared overnight (or within 24 hours since it is always night somewhere) as I was researching this stuff.

The internet was supposed to be beautiful. Good luck with that star wars question.... -- carol 17:54, 17 December 2007 (UTC)

I am not sure at what stage the 'internet was supposed to be beautiful', perhaps from right from its military project origin given the military's (as you've previously pointed out) take on beauty. Of course this closes the loop back to the star wars topic. --Tony Wills 01:02, 18 December 2007 (UTC)
Heh, that photograph -- I interpreted it as my countries attempt to keep up with European films. Nothing that I see or have seen this year has been weirder than that. Supposedly, I am looking into getting a print of that (for the bathroom).
Now, I am thinking about sheep in diapers. I did not want to think about sheep in diapers and it is being an image that is persistent and my efforts to move it aside have been failing. How to thank you for this? -- carol 11:37, 18 December 2007 (UTC)

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Which to keep

Take a look at the four png files here Category:Scouting_by_country, two of WOSM two of WAGGGS, each set dupes. What's interesting is the higher pixel count has a lower file size. Which pair should I keep? Respond here, I have a watch set. RlevseTalk 18:08, 25 December 2007 (UTC)

I tend to assume that things starting with 800px... are automatically scaled versions of things (as people seldom name files this way). If these were jpgs I would be more worried about the file size difference as you loose detail the more you compress them, but with png compression you are not supposed to get detail loss, so a larger resolution image that has a smaller file size (using better compression) is fine. I certainly can't see any fault with the larger resolution version so I would keep those ones.
I note that the smaller image pages have "self created, other Scout articles need this" which explicitly states that the uploader was the author, whereas the larger image pages have "Author=Original uploader was Kintetsubuffalo at en.wikipedia" which doesn't quite tell you that (although it can be inferred from the other details on the page). I would remove "Original uploader was " from the "Author" line so that it states explicitly that he was the author, not perhaps just the uploader.
ie "Author=Kintetsubuffalo at en.wikipedia" --Tony Wills 20:20, 25 December 2007 (UTC)
OK thanks, keep the higher resolution even if the file is smaller.RlevseTalk 21:12, 25 December 2007 (UTC)
Yes for pngs, for jpgs that would be less likely. --Tony Wills 21:22, 25 December 2007 (UTC)

license options once again

Hello Tony. One last simple question. It is possible to change the license from GFDL to cc-by-sa or cc-by-sa-dual afterwards? Fabelfroh 09:11, 26 December 2007 (UTC)

I don't think you can revoke the GFDL (which is a main point of free licenses :-), but you can add an alternative license (even a non free one, so long as they have a choice of a free one). So changing from GFDL to things like {{GFDL or cc-by-nc-sa}} or {{GFDL-CC-triple}} or {{self|GFDL|cc-by-sa}} are fine. :-) --Tony Wills 09:26, 26 December 2007 (UTC)
Thanks for the quick response. Just as I thought. Fabelfroh 10:01, 26 December 2007 (UTC)

Bot? I hope so :)

Hello! I think it's not allowed to tag using an automatic bot. so, I'm tagging without it. If you read {{AgenciaBrasil}}, it says very clearly: "To the uploader: You must provide a link (URL) to the original file and the authorship information if available.". All of these images don't have an URL source.--OsamaK 11:38, 26 December 2007 (UTC)

So you have been busy :-). Firstly what the template demands isn't actually relevant (it doesn't make the rules), the information presented covers what commons requires, and is rather more detailed than many other images have. Second there is an "out clause" - "if available". Often deep links into a site are no help because material is moved, or the site restructured. I think a tag that will have the images deleted if an uploader from 23 months ago doesn't respond in 7 days is a bit drastic when there is no obvious copyvio going on. I personally have no doubt that these images were sourced from there. Possibly we need to set up something like the flickr image verification system that checks soon after they are uploaded, that images really do come from that site. I don't think they keep many years of archives on site. So maybe some work needs doing, but deletion won't help anyone :-) --Tony Wills 11:53, 26 December 2007 (UTC)
Pictures from Agência Brasil taken before 28 July 2007 can be browsed at http://img.radiobras.gov.br/ (the site was indeed restructured and soon they'll move the pictures from there). It has a calendar, so you can search the pictures by date. Sometimes the server can overload. If so, deleting the cookies from radiobras.gov.br may help. --Julián Ortega Martínez 13:40, 28 December 2007 (UTC)

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Opinion

What do you think of these: Image:De_Alemannia_XIII_181.jpg - Image:De_Alemannia_XXIII_183.jpg? They are on Siebrand's dupes list and of the same passage but not from the same books. You can respond here, I watch your page.RlevseTalk 16:39, 29 December 2007 (UTC)

  • I would definitely keep both copies, we only automatically delete 'exact' duplicates, so even if these were two different scans of the same book we would only delete them after a discussion process (there are lots of possible reasons different versions may be useful, one maybe a better image for OCR conversion to a text file (eg high resolution, high contrast) (and even after OCR conversion you would keep the original in case there were queries about the accuracy of the scanning), another might be a more faithful rendition showing the paper and age of the book. In this case, scans from two different books, there may even be subtle revisions between the texts. --Tony Wills 21:01, 29 December 2007 (UTC)

PS..Quality wise, would this: Image:World_Jamboree_Site_008.jpg make it for Quality Image? One problem may be the guy who took it does not have a wiki account--I don't get that requirement at all. RlevseTalk 16:42, 29 December 2007 (UTC)

  • I think it might fall down on composition, it would look better if it was cropped to mainly show the two scouts at the front and the flag they are holding (definitely remove the partial face from the right). One aspect of QI was that it is to encourage people to create and upload high quality images especially for commons. That is why 'found' images from non-commoners are not eligible. --Tony Wills 21:01, 29 December 2007 (UTC)

...PPS what is the difference in a QI nomination and a consensual review? RlevseTalk 16:46, 29 December 2007 (UTC)

  • QI is designed to be a fast process, so a simple nomination and single review is all that is needed. Sometimes the review is contested (there are two days in which to contest a review), contested QI reviews are moved to the Consensual Review section to try and get a consensus of other reviewers to make a final decision. --Tony Wills 21:01, 29 December 2007 (UTC)
    • Thanks on all three. I'll keep both book images. I wonder why Siebrand listed them. So for QI, nom is the fast track, and cons review is for "let's make sure". I still don't like the rule about the person has to have an account. RlevseTalk 21:26, 29 December 2007 (UTC)

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dirty jobs

That was a big job to me, thank you for doing it. Those mon-eekeyes EEK! -- carol 22:27, 1 January 2008 (UTC)

:-) --Tony Wills 22:32, 1 January 2008 (UTC)

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Valuable Image Proposal

Hi Tony, I am working on a Valuable Image (VI) Proposal in my sandbox. Recalling the "great PH-x debate", I would be curious to hear what you think about it? I thought of posting it on COM:VP once it has been fine-tuned a little. If you like the idea, I would appreciate it if you could edit it a little. As you know I am not a native writer and I think the language/formulations can be improved here and there. Secondly, I am a real idiot at writing something in a clear, short and concise form. If you think it could be shortened down while still keeping the essence there I appreciate your comments. -- Slaunger 16:05, 2 January 2008 (UTC)

Thank you for your constructive and positive feedback. I have made some adjustments accordingly. -- Slaunger 21:04, 2 January 2008 (UTC)

Using someone elses Scratchbox

I actually don't like doing that.

Perhaps you would like to review (and/or reword, rewrite, remove, reiterate....) something that I did there? -- carol 01:35, 6 January 2008 (UTC)

Image:Rosa canina artifact.jpg

I see you removed the speedy delete for Image:Rosa canina artifact.jpg. Are you sure it is still in the FP discussion archives? Before the vote Lycaon removed the images from FP discussion. I wouldn't care if they're kept, but I don't want to see them in my gallery any more. --JaGa 00:19, 4 January 2008 (UTC)

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Leyo

Thanks for chiming in on Leyo, I should have told him that but I was being too nice. Also thanks for in general watching my talk page, you make highly valued inputs. Leyo has done it again Image:Natriumdihydrogenphosphat.png. Hmmm.RlevseTalk 13:12, 6 January 2008 (UTC)...One more thing, I think you'd make a great admin, would you like me to nominate you? RlevseTalk 13:13, 6 January 2008 (UTC)

Thanks :-), I'm not really keeping an eye on you, but your page is in my watchlist because of previous messages left there :-). Re adminship, that's the second offer of nomination in 2 months :-). I am a bit torn over the idea, I already spend far too much time here and I would probably take admin responsibility too seriously and spend even more time here. But then I know there is lots of admin work to be done and more hands are always needed. It is probably good for my soul to have no implied threat with any of my actions ;-). I'll let you know if I want to try for adminship :-) --Tony Wills 00:23, 7 January 2008 (UTC)

Hello, Tony Wills, can you have a look at the activities of the User:Dysmorodrepanis (Buteo). Thank you and greetings. Orchi 17:44, 6 January 2008 (UTC)

Simply said, it does not work for many parts of the tree (arthropods, plants are notorious). The categories get overcluttered and it becomes impossible to find what you want. Some people at arthropods are screaming bloody murder over tagging every image with a category and the point is entirely sensible. Redundancy levels have reached over 60% in some plant genera, and some of these have deteriorated to the point where any taxonomists' sensibilities are seriously offended ;-) due to inability to properly keep them updated (there are "maybe"s in systematics - and these are being addressed by categories quite successfully -, but they are not allowed in taxonomy; that is an exact science and should be honored as such)
In a nutshell, the most sensible system according to what I tried over the last year or so would be to start at family or order rank (usually, depending on the number of images available) and use categories, splitting off subcategories when maybe 3-5 images would be available for these. Species-level pages should be galleries accessible from a genus category page, and I'm dead serious here - taxonomy especially at the species level is in a major phase of flux and categories are too cumbersome to handle and update (moving, merging, renaming etc). So if there are only a handful of images per genus, it is well to tag them with the category. But if there are as many as in say Buteo, a high amount levels of cruft is created that will only drag down accuracy, as they never could be and never were properly maintained by someone with scientific experience because there were simply too many (for example, if Buteo augur had had a category like most of its congeners, it would be restored by now. In error, as the species is at present not recognized for the scope of Wikipedia).
For the record, I am one of the people who propagated the system at its present state (see my edits of OCT-2006 or so) and I myself find it to have failed at the species level. I recommend to abandon that. For the sake of accuracy and because the present system is unsatisafactory and even hazardous from a scientific standpoint: people rely upon it and introduce errors in the Wikipedia, and this is intolerable.
The idea that categories are for some reason necessary for sorting purposes is a common fallacy. If the tree is good (no isolated nodes), it does not matter if the leaves are not nodes. Images' affiliations are listed on the description page under where they are linked. One simply has to learn that there are 2 places where locational informatio is listed - categories at the bottom and linked-to lists at the top. Dysmorodrepanis 23:58, 6 January 2008 (UTC)
As a (taxonomically harmless) example, check out Category:Coliidae. 4 pages/categories for 4 images, and redlinks for at least 10 more. Dysmorodrepanis 00:05, 7 January 2008 (UTC)
  • I don't have a closed view on this, but have been maintaining bird images without resorting to removing categories. It is a fundamental problem to have one group within commons advocating, and 'enforcing' a way of operating different from the rest of Commons - it is asking for (and successfully achieves) continuous conflict. People are encouraged to add categories to their images, only to see those on plant and animal images removed - if they hadn't bothered to add categories, the TOL team would probably never have been aware of the image's existence. IMHO TOL must either persuade Commons to adopt their way of doing things for all images or tolerate others using methods used everywhere else on Commons (ie images can be categorised).
  • If people stopped seeing categories as 'pages' but branches of the tree, that incidentally display the images to make things easier, it would help. The taxonomic tree boxes are actually the redundant part of the system, categories are sufficient for the job (it is as though someone wants to create wikispecies within Commons), but I take the view that if people want to maintain such structures then good luck to them :-).
  • I do agree that some of your edits, removing the taxo info etc from category pages, makes sense - maintaining that stuff in one place (on gallery pages) is quite sufficient. Categories need contain nothing but other categories, and at their leaves, gallery pages (which we probably agree on :-) and the images themselves (which is disputed ;-). Taxo info, interwiki info, descriptions can all go on gallery pages. But given that people like to put all this stuff on category pages perhaps we should have a subpage where all this stuff is maintained which is transcluded into both places (which I have seen done occasionally). Of course there are others who want to put all this stuff on every image page (urrrggghh! ;-).
  • I don't actually see where we have a problem with over populated categories in flora/fauna areas, I thought we just broke things down where necessary to species (and even varieties). In fact I thought part of the reason that some see categories as redundant to galleries is that they have so few images for a species that all are displayed on the gallery page, rather than having the category as a pool of images and the gallery having a selection of the most useful (as defined by the gallery maintainer :-). Perhaps they haven't seen areas where we keep multiple revisions of images and don't want to display all on the gallery page.
  • When an image is categorised tools such as Catscan can be used to find images that intersect two different categories and other more interesting things.
  • Perhaps the fundamental error in this whole setup is that Commons is not part of Wikispecies, we need a systematic way of storing images, but not necessarily a taxonomic one! Perhaps en:wikipedia's idea of using common names is the most sensible :-). When adopting taxonomic categories there was perhaps the naive assumption that these were nice stable things ideal for our category system. Abandoning taxonomic categories would also imply abandoning taxonomic gallery names. We could name the galleries as per the en:wikipedia article names. This would of course suit en:wikipedia but not wikispecies (where there seems to be a disconnect from Commons classification anyway) and maybe other wikis which use taxonomic classification.
  • I don't believe the flux in taxonomic naming should be a factor, individual birds (and hence images) that belong to the same species don't change very much, moving them to renamed categories can be automated by a bot. I would have thought that a much more problematic factor was file-naming where an image is named with the current species name - renaming a file is much, much more painful - do you think we should ban this practice :-)
  • I am coming to the view that galleries and categories are not as important as the images having good (and correct) descriptions. Some methodologies use adding or subtracting images from galleries or categories as a marker that they have been identified, I think this fraught with problems. I advocate that projects that wish to mark their work use a custom tag, maybe make that tag a category or even a template - eg {{WikiProject Birds}}
  • I do think we have to find ways of working that do not involve undoing each others work :-) --Tony Wills 02:30, 7 January 2008 (UTC)
yikes! I see a future where there is a javascript which marks images as {{ungallaried}} and it is not very pretty and for all of the focus it is not very sharp. -- carol 11:25, 8 January 2008 (UTC)

Quality Image Problem

I am trying to figure out the location for Image:Lviv - Arsenal - 23.jpg. I am so bored, that I am thinking that Industrial or Household is the best place.

In a few hours, you should probably check what I do between now and then. -- carol 11:27, 8 January 2008 (UTC)

Done. Please note that deletions requested by authors for superseding reasons are traditionnally granted if no opposition arises: the uploading a new version of the file would achieve the same effect. Jastrow (Λέγετε) 09:01, 9 January 2008 (UTC)

I hadn't noticed the picture was a QI, my mistake. From now on I'll pay more attention and warn the QI people when a QI picture is proposed for deletion. Jastrow (Λέγετε) 09:20, 9 January 2008 (UTC)
Oh s***. I'll try and avoid to work on DR for too long stretches. Jastrow (Λέγετε) 10:12, 9 January 2008 (UTC)
:-) --Tony Wills 12:06, 9 January 2008 (UTC)

Gratitious comments

Thanks Tony, but I have a thick skin sometimes ;-). Lycaon 12:26, 9 January 2008 (UTC)

My skin isn't though and perhaps others aren't as well. A suggestion to do what I did until it is not so painful to do otherwise is not 'gratuitous'. -- carol 12:41, 9 January 2008 (UTC)
Well, my first point would be that you don't actually follow your own 'advice' and actually ignore him (otherwise you wouldn't have posted there :-). It is easy to maintain an on going irritation in a relationship between people with little comments like that :-).
Your suggestion would have been much more appropriate if you were commenting on a current heated discussion, rather than a request to talk. But I agree that in general dis-engaging from a conflict and stepping back rather than responding to every action is a good step.
Sometimes my blood boils at other's actions, and I rattle off a stinging response, but I generally don't press the 'save' button :-). I think 'why am I reacting this way', and 'how will venting my feelings, at the other person, help?' usually I then start again and post a reply as though I really believe the other party is operating with good intentions (even if I don't feel it ;-). This usually works, and in retrospect I can see that their actions were well meaning (even if misguided ;-) after all :-). (of course sometimes I do press that save button too soon, and a bit of 'niggle' appears in my posts ;-) --Tony Wills 21:27, 9 January 2008 (UTC)
There are some suggestions that can be made that get the opposite of what had been proposed in the suggestion. Here is an example. "Please don't think about (or 'ignore') those two bugs in the holding tank of the recently promoted Quality Images." If there were two bugs there, and I read this suggestion, it would probably cause me to to think of only those two bugs until they had been taken care of.
At least, I think that is how it works.... -- carol 01:00, 10 January 2008 (UTC)

I have a list of other suggestions that I could have made. I thought I had chosen the most appropriate (least offensive), but perhaps I was wrong in my thinking. The first one I discarded was 'Just ignore <such and such photographer> because I think I read somewhere that he is a phlegmy biologist." Should I list them all? -- carol 01:02, 10 January 2008 (UTC)

My thick skin is wearing out fast. And I don't seem to be the only one :-((. Lycaon 13:25, 11 January 2008 (UTC)

That is a horrible photograph. It stands out because it is one of the few horrible photographs I have seen with your name on it. I would not put that on wiki-species -- did you?
I really have other things I wanted to do than to mention how great your photographs usually are -- I did not like the description of deer and their habits either when I read about them. That photograph -- I had a great venison tongue in Montreal and it also looks like shoes to me.
I was about to type defensively about using the word 'phlegmy' which was a very thought out rudeness. My skin is not so thick either.
I have FPs to delist -- go away! -- carol 13:55, 11 January 2008 (UTC)

thoughts about QI galleries

I have had time to think about this as I await the downloading of the changed galleries and/or preview drawing while sorting through the candidates in waiting. The wiki software warns about pages that have too many words, but perhaps not about pages that contain too many images. I think that the galleries are perhaps too big for some browsers to safely download them for viewing -- forget editing. I actually was going to ask an Internet Explorer user about if there was problems or not with this, but it seems to be very risky to hurt feelings maybe, about software choices and such.

I have no idea of where to start to make the suggestion that some of those galleries get separated into pages and I also have no idea how to do it should the suggestion become accepted.

With my pretty good internet connection and my not too shabby, only kind of stale browser -- I am impressed with how much time I have waiting for the pages to load to think about the problem with that. -- carol 13:04, 9 January 2008 (UTC)

Yes I agree, I have often wondered why we bother with those galleries as they are a lot of work to maintain and need much more constant sorting to be useful. They are not a useful place to search for images because there are so many and new entries are generally added at one end. Sporadic attempts to sort things don't last. Even the main QI gallery could do with an improved maintenance scheme (eg show the best of the crop rather than just a window showing the latest). I expect the current methods of operation have simply developed to 1) not offend people by just displaying everything and 2) to not impose excessive workload on the maintainers.
So a good shake-up wouldn't hurt, preferably a change where most things can be automatically filed by QICbot (assuming we even want to maintain these sorts of galleries), and a human (or two) maintains an interesting and thoughtful QI gallery. --Tony Wills 21:49, 9 January 2008 (UTC)
I've actually been thinking about that too. It wouldn't be hard to make QICbot maintain the galleries of the last four QIs per category. But humans would still be needed to assign the categories to the promoted QIs. We could rework the recently promoted page to include a section heading for each category and an unsorted section at the bottom. QICbot would add all new candidates to the unsorted section from where they'd be manually moved to the correct category sections. QICbot could then in the next bot run pic the sorted pictures from the category sections and add them to the latest four QI preview galleries and the huge galleries if we decide to keep them. --Dschwen 23:06, 9 January 2008 (UTC)
I really loved the frost image of yours, Dschwen, btw. I have seen photographs of that kind of thing but I have never actually seen it in real life and I have honestly seen all sorts of frost. I have been trying to determine what kind of weather combination would grow such crystals and the only thing that I can come up with on my own is a dry humidity -- which makes no sense. Soon, I will probably give up and read about it, but until then, it really was very very beautiful. -- carol 01:31, 10 January 2008 (UTC)

It doesn't look like any other Rubus fruticosus photographs anywhere (or on English wikipedia or 2 or 3 pages of image search results of the whole web). It does have some resemblance to Rubins canadensis or Smooth blackberry however. -- carol 13:58, 10 January 2008 (UTC)

Interesting, I'll go back and see if I can find it again to look at the plants form. Wild blackberry is rather common and classified as a noxious weed (like most things classed as noxious, because it annoys farmers). I have only every noticed two different types (diiferent flavours!), but there may be lots around here which are recognised botanically as different. But the description I found of that species doesn't sound like our ones:
"Rubus canadensis L. (R. procumbetis Muhl.) is an upright or ascending shrub growing in sandy soil of many sections of the United States east of the Mississippi river. It attains a height of about 4 feet and differs from the preceding species chiefly by possessing recurved prickles and wedge-ovate leaflets which are serrate above middle and white-tomentose on lower surface."
Especially liking sandy soil, as the soils around here are clay --Tony Wills 22:20, 10 January 2008 (UTC)
Ever since I found some species here that are supposed to be in Europe where they are not mentioned on the range maps as being there -- I try to really look at the image. I wanted to put that image on an article but it didn't look enough like all of the other images online of the same species. The thing about this is that I am going simply on the looks of things. So whatever....
I also had to take a few minutes to sit back and remember how really tiny that flower is in real life. Where I lived, we had wild black raspberries and not blackberries -- we could tell the difference by the way the fruit was attached to the plant. I have no idea what the species was. I do know that the wild ones were much more flavorful and with just a little bit of seasonal care stopped being an obnoxious invader.
The blackberry flowers are not that small (I can't remember Raspberry flowers, I will have to go hunt some down), there is a bit of variation though. There seems to be white and pink blossoms on the same vines, and either 5 or 7 petals (except where some have fallen off). All sorts of plants have been introduced here, many of them accidentally, many purposefully. But many grow rather faster than in their home ranges and rapidly become weeds. Eg Gorse introduced as a good shrub for making hedges (prickles dissuade animals from pushing through it), but it rapidly invades whole fields and hillsides. I expect that blackberry vines (brambles) were introduced accidentally (but maybe not!) and there may be many species. The reference I found to "Rubus canadensis" in New Zealand are on gardening pages, so it appears it does exist here, so it is possible that it is roaming wild too. But there is the detail of the unsuitability of the soil around here. I still try and pick wild blackberries, but the local city councils etc have caught on that cutting them back actually is quite good for berry production and instead do nasty things like spray them. But fresh blackberry and apple pie - Yum! :-) --Tony Wills 22:49, 11 January 2008 (UTC)

Pesche photographers

If I am following the way things work here, I am going to have to leave a note for the wolf man to tell richie that perhaps his new protege should learn the joys of maintaining the contests here as well as the joys of 'approval' -- or did I miss something?

Emptying the 'diapers' of those contests helps to understand what 'not spamming them' means. I have 45 years of living in which I get to learn that 'winning is not everything'. So, just in case anyone involved here wants to claim that I was taught that lesson, they will have to stand in a very long line of people who came before them before they can make that claim. The last 4 years, it seems to be about how fraud does work. (fraud, not freud...)

Also, do you know of any reason (behind the scenes or running in tandem with the proceedings here) that would make contributors honestly desperate to win those 'approvals' here? I think that it is a rare human who is not desperate about something -- I myself am quite desperately sad that no amount of positive (or negative) doing seems to be used to restore me to where I belong. Winning isn't everything, but the humiliation of people who can accomplish things -- this is everything?

I only put that Wright Flyer image into FP because it really is the better version. It is all that I can do not to paste the script from my user page onto the one that is in the FP galleries now.

It should be about good images -- the pixels on the screen. There are so many many things that can be wrong with images also. What a pain in the ass!

Do you think that there is a more direct method to communicate all of this with those pesky photographers? -- carol 00:42, 11 January 2008 (UTC)

"humiliation of people who can accomplish things" sounds a bit like the "tall poppy syndrome", all about pulling people back down to your level, not letting them seem superior. I'm not too sure that that is what operates here. In some ways it is a bit more impersonal, and is not so much about "yours is not a good photo", but about "they didn't let my photo through, which I think is better than yours, therefore I won't let yours through". So not so much about absolute criteria, but about comparative subjectiveness. This even flows through to QI, even though that isn't a competition between people (whereas FP is). As others have said, both systems actually tend to let through the really good images and block the really bad ones. The trouble is most of us produce images in the middle and which way they go sometimes seems arbitrary, and is often inconsistent. A system that just had a panel of judges that made self-consistent decisions would probably make people happier.
I was reading en:Reputation management (following links from Wikiversity after following links from the Photography Guide) and how that controls peoples behaviour and acts as an incentive when participating in online projects, and how if the rewards are too low people won't bother, and if the rewards are too difficult to achieve, people won't bother. It seems to explain a lot of behaviour.
To my mind the most important feature of photos for these wiki projects, is that the details of the subject should be clear - simply the subject be in focus, with as much DOF and lighting as needed to show the details. Background noise, background over/under-exposure or even distracting elements in the background are pretty irrelevant. What we want is useful photos, pretty is nice, but not the main requirement.
I suppose you might have noticed Image:Wrightflyer highres compare.jpg, I think some objections to your version were valid, there is a significant loss of detail compared to the original. I didn't compare yours with the existing FP version. Maybe the existing FP version falls short too. I don't think you should feel you were hard done by, by not getting it accepted. Whether the existing FP version should be delisted is a separate issue :-) --Tony Wills 00:02, 12 January 2008 (UTC)
Perhaps the Valuable Image thing should have the rule that one negative vote cancels out three or four (or perhaps more) positive votes -- as that seems to fit the model of the sensitive nature of some of the better photographers who are active here. Heck, I am opposed to one photograph which is terrible because it would boot out another photograph by the same girl which is both awesome and funny in the four on the one page.
Is it photography or fauxtography?
I am not going to request the deletion of the current Wright Flyer FP -- it was never even in my mind to do such a thing. A few of those images are completely bogus though.... -- carol 02:15, 12 January 2008 (UTC)

Categories

So you volunteer for straightening out the Category:Sylviidae and Category:Timaliidae for example? Good luck.

And you might also want to restore Category:Otus kennicottii while you're at it. I "disrupted" that too... (hint: en:Sylviidae, en:Timaliidae, en:Megascops)?

The so-called "SOP" does not work, period. So it has to go. I am sick and tired of having to dig through all this redundant cruft. Much of Passeriformes has come to bear only a passing resemblance to current scientific understanding. This is intolerable. What is the rationale behind maintaining Category:Buteo buteo in parallel to Buteo buteo?

It is basically a dispute about whether science or tradition should govern the categorization system. With the present system, the former can be achieved only at a disproportionally high workload. Species/genus-level taxonomy is in a flux across all domains of life. Genus allocation of species is changing as fast as never before. With species-level categories, how should this ever be maintainable? How could content be arranged in any meaningful way?

And PS I perfectly understand the present system. As I said, I was one of the people who established it. Big mistake, I say now we have that much more content. It was nice when we didn't have dozens of pics per named taxon. It doesn't work now. Dysmorodrepanis 12:52, 11 January 2008 (UTC)

Ha! Got an idea! On en: it works very nice to run two parallel trees of categories - one systematic, and another common-names. Now, it we would use it here, we could give each image a category (common name) and still maintain a "clean" scientific tree. Redundancy would be suppressed, because there won't be any, really (Also helps with splits like that of the "Common Scops-owl").
So the whole "Sylviidae" would simply go into a "warblers" category and have species pages with common names to group it. These could then be interlinked with the taxonomic tree at the appropriate level. It will make it MUCH easier for laypersons to find and categorize content correctly, while on the other hand maintaining the scientific tree nice and clean.
Might not work too well for arthropods though :( (I had a bit of a quarrel with one arthro guy which is basically a mirror of what we have here now, only that my position was closer to yours, and his was more extreme than mine. He was very very angry at the present system, because it could not be made to fit by any means. But even arthropods tend to have common names at the family level (the common names - that's how Linne got his idea in the first place. Except they were in Latin or Greek in his time).
As for the scientific classification issue - NEVER EVER must this be abandoned. Commons is intimately connected to an encyclopedia, not to a preschool book ;-) But if adding vernacular-name categories helps, I'm all for it.
Wikispecies is off because it was (for birds) originally constructed based on Sibley/Ahlquist which we now know to be wrong in some key parts (such as "Corvida") and nobody has since revised it. Large quantities of data tend to become stale. Other taxa are often based on spurious sources which are rarely cited (Google helps).
In any case, I will refrain from further such edits (at least in Birds - can't promise anything when it comes to plants which are sometimes too seriously messed up to keep them the way they are. But I'm trying to keep my hands off), noting that there needs to be a solution. Birds on en: is closing towards a stable systematics/taxonomy at the family level and above - it's basially Wikipedia waiting for new research to be published, not trying to catch up with what has already been published. Which is very cool. So the opportunity to fix it to a point where it is robust in all respects is now.
To run through the whole thing with an example:
Image:Buteo buteo 060716 800v1.jpg would be tagged/linked thus:
and so on.
It might actually work. I note it works even better than I hoped on a category-only level on Wikipedia. But as you said - species-level pages and categories are basically 2 kinds of "leaves" as one would say in phylogeny. I was expecting some roblems regarding the points-of-connection, but there have not been such problems. On the contrary, controversial cases can actually be handled if one uses a "scientific" and a "vernacular" tree, which is quite tough using only one of these. The latter is the more stable one, and hence it is well-suited to being based on categories and categories alone, which are more cumbersome to maintain. The scientific tree is the one most fluid at present, and hence it would be better suited to be handled to some extent via pages, which are easy to keep up to date using redirects.
Do you think this could be formally proposed? I would like to try it out, but this would be quite a lot of work and I wouldn't want to do this just to see it get reverted. Maybe some waterfowl is where one could start - these already have the common-names system in place down to subfamily or so. Dysmorodrepanis 13:55, 11 January 2008 (UTC)
Another advantage - non-English common names can be handled using redirect-to-category much better than they can be handled now. Vernacular names in different languages map better on each other than they map on taxonomic names. So although the vernacular-name tree would be in English, other languages could redirect to the appropriate category in it. Falken redirecting to Category:Falcons or Turmfalke redirecting to Category:Common Kestrel. The German Adler, Polish orel etc are essentially identical in content to the English Category:Eagles - but none of the three would match any currently-valid taxon. Dysmorodrepanis 14:15, 11 January 2008 (UTC)

The problem is that plain category pages are close to non-human-readable. No way to annotate images for example. It would be nice if this could be handled via image descriptions, but this is impossible due to the facts that a) images are frequently not annotated in English and/or key information is frequently missing (location for example) and b) the sheer number of new media. Also, categories are totally hodgepodge because they simply sort alphabetically and image names are not maintained in any consistent manner (not that this would make sense). Finding specific content in a large cat (several pages) creates major overhead.

The bottom line from the Polbot experience is: taxonomic/systematic issues must never be left to bots. They cannot handle it. The desiderata of scientists and bots are mutually exclusive. The present system - were it fully implemented - makes Commons:TOL essentially a non-human-readable thing (trying to dig through all those images without informative names/descriptions in a large category is simply not worth the effort). But should the aim really be to build a tree that is as useless to the human user as possible? I think not. Subspecies identification for example, or more generally anything that relies on external sources (such as range maps) cannot be handled by a bot, because no bot has access to non-digital information.

If for example the canges I did to Category:Carduelis would be acceptable and the blanked categories would have been deleted, the mainenance work when this "genus" is split - as it has been in the past and inevitably will be in the future, because nobody really wants to see crossbills lumped with greenfinches - would decrease substantially for example, because there will be only minor changes to 4 pages, which should take less than a minute altogether. At present, none of the subcategories could be allowed when the genus is split. And you can bet that I won't spend one single second on setting these up for deletion; somebody else will have to do that, but probably (judging from Sylvioidea on Commons, and what's contained therein) nobody will for months or even years to come. And another taxon will go to waste.

Another problem with categories at species rank is maintenance. Often, uploaders are unawares of the correct taxonomy and images are mis-tagged. If a wrong page/gallery results, this can be eaily fixed with a redirect. This can even be handled automatically; it cannot be done for categories. These can redirect but this does not prevent images from being placed in them. I have accidentally found a number of images in Category:Unidentified insects - only because I knew that some image had to be there but was missing in Category:Unknown insects I came across it. So any obsolete category needs to be deleted, and this would need human interference. Using species-rank categories creates a huge workload that is obviously not manageable by any means: even the workload we have now is not manageable, or else the tree would not have rotted as much as it has.

(IONO how many people are actually aware of this. Usually you'll never find out because the media in a redirecting category are hidden from view. And even though I know now that this exists, I have no idea how common this is.)

Maybe the solution is just a paradigm shift in bot programming: a bot might be able to HTTP-request a page and not just the image metadata. An image page's HTTP code contains id="filelinks" which in turn, for any image linked in a gallery, is followed by one or more (depending on how many galleries the image is part of) strings not containing "/Image:". These are the gallery pages. It should be possible to code this into a regex that handles gallery information as well as present bots handle category information. I do not think this is being done at present, but it ought to be tried.

The issue keeps dragging down work I am doing on Wikipedia; sometimes I spend 1/3 of my time trying to round up content on Commons because it is strewn about between up to 4 pages/cats. This is unnecessary cruft and should not happen.

So maybe we could take this to the Talk page of TOL and see to that finally a guideline can be established that fulfils the needs of human users and namely those with scientific background first. Because most of the actual use of Commons is by humans, not by bots, and it never was intended as a resource for bots, and because scientific-name cats/pages are more interesting/useful to those who at least have heard of the ICZN/ICBN.

Another case that needs fixing, like, yesterday: Category:Paridae. It is not even internally consistent (expand Parus subcat). I am just glad that I don't seem to have any Paridae work on 'pedia coming up soon... still, I found Image:Azure tit by Vincent van der Spek.jpg which I have been looking for for IONO how long. But needless to say, the image does not belong to where it is now but actually on Cyanistes cyanus. And so on. It is a major mess.

I am presently reading a new paper on Monk Parakeets and the Wikipedia page does not have a Commons link. The problem is that the genus Myiopsitta is presently monotypic in the scope of Wikipedia but it is generally suspected to contain 2 species, one of which is simply too little-studied for for example the AOU to make a decision to split it. On Commons there are: Category:Myiopsitta, Category:Myiopsitta monachus and Myiopsitta monachus. At least the former is at present redundant but eventually might become necessary (though we neither have media for the putative species nor is it likely that we will anytime soon). So... what Commons page/cat to use? Dysmorodrepanis 16:38, 12 January 2008 (UTC)

Briefly: How to make bots handle galleries just as easily as they handle cats:

  • take page source
  • does source contain the string The following pages link to this file:? If yes, continue, else do something else (image may be tagged with a category "unlinked images" or so, it this is desired) or nothing at all
  • filter out everything except section between The following pages link to this file: and <div class="printfooter">
  • filter out everything except all occurrences of "/wiki/[alphanumerical string]"; each of these needs to be treated as a separate string
  • filter out everything that contains /:
  • filter out "/wiki/ and the last character (")

The result should be the list of pages which contain the image as part of a gallery. This can then be handled as desired - e.g. just as category information is handled. Dysmorodrepanis 17:05, 12 January 2008 (UTC)

Thanks

Thanks for your quick response to the bit of silliness on my talkpage. Much obliged :) ~ Riana 09:32, 12 January 2008 (UTC)

AWB

Hey, sorry for those edits, generally there's nothing before template information, so I put ==Summary== line higher. I'll try to seek and correct wrong edits. Regards, Yarl TalkPL 21:02, 12 January 2008 (UTC)

I will try to avoid those problems in future :). Yarl TalkPL 21:16, 12 January 2008 (UTC)

Wikinews:Picture of the Year

Hi,

I would be honoured if you would consider voting for Wikinews:Picture of the Year.

--Steven Fruitsmaak (Reply) 11:35, 13 January 2008 (UTC)

POTY Competition

Hi, I'm writing to let you know that an image of yours that become a Commons Featured Picture during 2007 is now part of the 2007 Picture of the Year competition. If you have > 200 edits you are welcome to vote too. Thanks for contributing your valuable work and good luck. Herby talk thyme 17:11, 13 January 2008 (UTC)

an indulgence in the QI gallery

I expanded the gallery for birds because I am not yet ready to see the dip in the road not be there. Then I expanded the gallery for other animals because there were exactly 8 in the holding area. I think that the only image which did not find space there was that weird purple thing of Alves'.

Expanding the bird gallery I did purely and most selfishly for myself. Expanding the other animals gallery -- how to get the photographers to hold on to their images for a while? And should that be expected?

Also, sorry, I don't care about where and how you vote anywhere. The winners of things here have a tainted smell to them to me.

Good luck out there! -- carol 10:11, 14 January 2008 (UTC)

Well it's just a wiki gallery, I always (well, maybe not always ;-) take the view that a gallery page should contain exactly what the last maintainer of it sees fit. If you wish to maintain it, you choose how it looks (works fine until two people insist on maintaining the same gallery, as though there isn't quite enough other stuff to do ;-). I usually just let the QI gallery balloon out to accommodate however many new images there was, and then contract upon the next update (try to give new images at least one day in the gallery!). I expect others will tolerate an indulgence or two (just watched movie about Luther) if its not just to display your own images :-).
I've had three invites (one by email) to vote on piccys, don't know whether I will manage it. Takes so much time to look at each image (I like to assess images at full screen resolution, not 100%, not thumbnail), I expect the 'winner' will be something that has appeal at thumbnail size, it will need something to pull people in to bother assessing it (I assume people won't just vote on the thumbnails :-( --Tony Wills 12:09, 14 January 2008 (UTC)
So, you are saying that I should mention this to the maintainer? Also, another question. Do you put something on the fence that attracts and perhaps makes the bugs stick there? -- carol 15:10, 14 January 2008 (UTC)
Yes, I think you should (as the current maintainer) talk to yourself :-).
I was thinking of doing a web page just about the fence. It acts as a barrier even to insects, they run into it and sometimes seem to tire of working out how to get around it. There does seem to be an abundance of insects that just cling to it waiting for something (sometimes a mate). Some get stuck in it. Photography wise it does have the advantage that even on windy days (the norm for Wellington) it doesn't move (although insects like Image:Puriri_moth-02.jpg were blowing about madly), gives me a fighting chance of getting a macro photo without motion blur. As for attraction, perhaps the sanctuary has an attraction - I recently got a shot of a stoat peering through the fence, it had been running along the boundary, stopping and testing the fence. Also found a dried up (dead) frog at the base of the fence, sitting facing the fence, perhaps attracted by the water in the old reseviour. --Tony Wills 20:33, 14 January 2008 (UTC)

Quality United Image Transferrer Yearly

A five point fractal instead of a five point barnstar.

I tried to spell QUITY.

I started to look through the history of that place where the bot deposits the winners of the QI thing and I started to feel sad and lonely -- and all I was doing was looking at the months since March 27, 2007 in which you have done close to 99% of the work there. I did not even live those months or do that work.

I am not going to take this opportunity to bring up that Kubrick movie -- the one where the owners of a home attracted new owners so that they could cease being the guardians of the doorway to hell, or whatever the plot to that thing was (All work and no play) because I was at the very least correct in thinking that you needed a break.

No barnstar for you -- your own resins whirled out this beautiful golden thing.

I honestly felt bad that you had been doing that work alone when I looked and saw that you had been doing it single-handedly for a month or so, without crawling back through the history to see that the 'or so' was many many months.

This is an amazing community. I am amazed -- are you? -- carol 13:57, 15 January 2008 (UTC)

Quality Image Promotion

Your image has been reviewed and promoted

Congratulations! Huhu beetle 01.jpg, which was produced by you, was reviewed and has now been promoted to Quality Image status.

If you would like to nominate another image, please do so at Quality images candidates.

We also invite you to take part in the categorization of recently promoted quality images.
Comments {{{3}}}

Antidorcas marsupialis

Procedural discussion removed from QIC page:

  •  Comment Didn't you read the QI rules? You are supposed to move this to CR and then vote for it if you feel strongly about it. This is the yellow box not the red one! I haven't even opposed it yet. -- carol 13:59, 11 January 2008 (UTC)
  •  Support Wow, ok, I'll have to set my mediocre manners aside for a second, this is complete bullshit. I'll change this back to promote since no one opposed it. If anyone does not agree move it to CR yourself! --Dschwen 18:12, 13 January 2008 (UTC)
  •  CommentIf you had said deer shit, it would be easier to simply agree with you. As a belated attempt to redeem myself, this image should go into the QI collection and be pointed at as a good example of the quality of work that can be expected from the photographer. Where else should I apologize? -- carol 03:11, 14 January 2008 (UTC)
 Result: 1 support, 0 oppose --> Promoted to QI -- Alvesgaspar 21:59, 15 January 2008 (UTC)
  •  Comment I can sympathise with early closure, but I would normally use the rule "In case of draw, or if no additional opinions are given other than the first reviewer's, the image will stay in Consensual Review for a maximum period of 8 days, counted from its entry." and leave it for 8 days if no further votes were added, then promote it per the original vote. Or we could have counted Dschwen's vote as support and promoted it 48 hours after the last comment/opinion. Is there any real hurry? :-) --Tony Wills 02:46, 16 January 2008 (UTC)
  •  Comment Sorry, but this image shouldn't be in CR, according to the rules. That was the interpretation of Dschwen and also mine. -- Alvesgaspar 09:34, 16 January 2008 (UTC)
  •  Comment I see from the history that Dschwen did actually change it back to a promotion, so that is an implicit support. I think we can also take Carol's actions as an oppose (the explicit support/oppose thing is just to make it easier to count votes, actions speak louder than words). There were a whole bunch of /Discuss templates that I moved here together, the only one I didn't move here is one that was changed to a /Discuss and has no comments or signature on. Anyway closed with a 2 support, 1 oppose vote. --Tony Wills 21:21, 16 January 2008 (UTC)
Usually images go from a 'Promotion' or a 'Decline' to a 'Discuss' if some one takes the time to have a problem with the 'Promotion' or the 'Decline' being applied to the template that surrounds the image that is being discussed. I changed the template from 'Promotion' to 'Discuss' and then a 'Comment' was added by another person and then the template was changed back to 'Promotion' by yet another person.
It would be helpful to me (and perhaps to others) to know how I could have better handled this -- especially since there is no 'Support' or 'Oppose' in the template for candidates which are not in review? -- carol 05:00, 17 January 2008 (UTC)
It is usual to change the /Promotion or /Decline to /Discuss and then move the whole thing to CR. We were getting quite a few nominations moved to CR without people actually voting on them, which usually ended up with them languishing for a long time in CR. So we added the guideline that entries should only be moved to CR when the original review had been opposed. The oppose/support templates aren't a necessary part of CR, they simply make it easy to judge where the consensus is. As I said above, your 'one of the worst images I have ever seen nominated here' comment is an implicit oppose (despite your protestations ;-). It makes no real sense to change a review decision to /discuss unless you oppose it, unless you just want to delay the original promotion/decline ;-), QI is *meant* to be a quick and simple process :-). If you don't wish to contest a review decision, but wish to discuss the general QI criteria, the talk page is a better place :-) --Tony Wills 08:43, 17 January 2008 (UTC)
There was an amount of time left. The date of nomination was 9 January 2008. When it turned to 'Promotion' on 10 January 2008 that gave the image 48 hours to have the Promotion questioned; I could have waited longer to question it. There have been awkward parts to this mechanism to fill a gallery of quality images. 1) I have a difficult time uploading changed images in the place of images that have been nominated. 2) People vote or make requests and do not ever seem to return to see if the requests were satisfied or follow their vote through. 3) When the requests to an image have been satisfied, it should (in my opinion) be up to the photographer/nominator to upload the changed image over the original. 4)As I have been attempting to move nominations to CR, I have a difficult time turning a comment to an Opposition. I have appreciated it when the voter does it themselves. 5)About this image, I would have happily opposed it when it entered CR here. There are a lot of images here right now, the wiki software warns about the page length 6)does Dschwen have a crystal ball or direct phoneline to god or something that the knowledge of what I did and meant is more there than here with me? -- carol 10:08, 17 January 2008 (UTC)

Commons is slow in January

Yawn. Who said that anyways? -- carol 13:11, 20 January 2008 (UTC)

an image I do not remember

Image:MC Olgas pano.jpg -- I just don't remember it being there. -- carol 14:41, 21 January 2008 (UTC)

Image:Yarra Panorama.jpg -- same problem. Although, to be fair and honest, I don't really know what to look for in a panorama. -- carol 14:57, 21 January 2008 (UTC)

You don't remember the image being in QIC, or you don't remember that view? :-) --Tony Wills 12:02, 22 January 2008 (UTC)

Springbok

Hi Tony, would you mind closing that procedure? Thanks. Lycaon 07:29, 22 January 2008 (UTC)

Thnx. Lycaon 12:46, 22 January 2008 (UTC)
Very tricky closing that procedure and I appreciate the 'pro' in the request here -- after an extraordinary amount of effort on my part, it is closed. -- carol 14:24, 26 January 2008 (UTC)

RE:POTY ranking

Hi, Tony
Thank you very much for the kind words about my images. The final outcome is that my turtle image got fifth place, which is great.I believe there were many more images that deserved this much more than my image did.
May I please also take this opportunity to thank you for the nominating two of my images for QI after I withdrawn my nominations? It was very kind and nice of you to do it for me at that time.--Mbz1 20:47, 25 January 2008 (UTC)

Valuable Images or whatever the name should be

Hi Tony,

I appreciate your often wise and balanced comments on policies, procedures and how things work here. I know you are busy i18ning QI, but I was wondering if you could spare a little time on reading and perhaps even commenting on the more recent discussions concerning the Valuable Images proposal. One good question is the proper term for this thing.... and there are several other open issues on which consensus is needed. -- Slaunger 12:30, 26 January 2008 (UTC)

QI promotion

I know that QI has no limit for similar photographs, but are you sure that both the original and edit should be promoted here? They're identical pictures, and the original has more support... Thegreenj 01:00, 28 January 2008 (UTC)

I am with Thegreenj on this. It feels like two of the same image are being promoted because of lack of interest -- not 'quality'. -- carol 01:24, 28 January 2008 (UTC)
I have seen a number of images promoted and a number drop off the end because no one seemed interested. If you feel that it is important, rather than take an executive decision (considering that we have no executive powers ;-), why don't you undo the promotions, call them back to CR, and then lobby each voter to see whether they really wanted that outcome (all a lot of work :-). If we start tossing a coin and deciding which one 'should' be promoted, then we are taking on more responsibility for decision making in the QIC process than the community has granted anyone. If you think we should have an arbitrator or administrator or some other role, I think we would just be creating one more bureaucrat - I tend to favour an anarchist approach :-). I see no inherent problem with having almost identical images as QIs (I expect there are others), boring, but not a real problem. Perhaps if we just leave it, it will encourage people to be more attentive in the future ;-) --Tony Wills 01:43, 28 January 2008 (UTC)
  • If you both got together and voted the same way on each image (ie both oppose one, both promote the other), it would result in sufficient votes to only have one promoted (unless someone else votes). But technically they are both well beyond the time they should have been in CR. If the nominators insist on the letter of the rules, they both should be promoted, if the nominators don't object, I expect the rules can be stretched :-). Would need to allow 48hrs after voting, and notify nominators, so people have some chance to object :-) --Tony Wills 01:58, 28 January 2008 (UTC)
I did this. I tried to make it easy for anyone who was voting opposite of me to do so for that soft and noisy hawaii pano. It would be nice for that to get the one opposition vote it needs and my joke support vote to be struck and get rid of that thing, that image, as well. It really does look like a butter sculpture surrounding a pool of noise.... -- carol 04:05, 28 January 2008 (UTC)
I have changed them back to /discuss and notified the nominators. --Tony Wills 10:24, 28 January 2008 (UTC)

QI Gallery

Templates are being used for the main gallery now?

Other Gallery: things got moved around there. Some images from May 2007 are now showing before images from December 2007. Is that intentional? -- carol 11:36, 29 January 2008 (UTC)

Done. :-) Loco085 msg 17:04, 30 January 2008 (UTC)